Palestinian Incitement, Not Despair or Settlements, Is the Cause of Terror,

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Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Photo/Cia Pak.

The BDS movement lies when it says that Palestinian violence is caused by “the despair of occupation and oppression.”

If this were true, then why is it that Muslim youths perpetrated all the random knifing, stoning, and driving attacks against Israelis in the months following the Jewish New Year –but not Christian Arabs?

Are they not suffering from the same despair? Or does BDS imply that the grievance of “occupation and oppression” is for Muslim Arabs only?

Palestinian violence is linked to incitement couched in Islamic terms, and fed by both wings of the Palestinian leadership.

Diplomats, the media, and BDS downplay Hamas, but Hamas represents the real face of Palestine and the Arab hatred of Israel.

It shamelessly announces its hatred, which is publicly enshrined in its Charter. That Charter offers religious, political, and humanitarian reasons why it’s essential to kill Jews and destroy Israel.

It elevates the Islamic nature of Palestinian society to bond the people in a spiritual aspiration to achieve these goals.

The corrupt Palestinian Authority has been robbing its people for decades. The leaders’ palaces are evidence of their blatant cronyism. Arafat is reported to have stashed a billion dollars in overseas bank accounts.

Arafat for years would cry poor, saying, “I can’t pay the salaries, we’re going to have a disaster, and the Palestinian economy is going to collapse.” At the same time he accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars.

Arafat used some of that money to prop up rival terrorist groups, each competing against the other to gain favor from their patron.

Arafat was, in word and deed, a prototype Islamic arch-terrorist seeking the death of Jews.

One of his many outrages was called the Al-Aqsa Intifada, which began in September 2000. More than a thousand Israelis were killed by Palestinian suicide bombings and shootings. This resulted in a harsh Israeli response and a distrust of Arafat as a peace partner.

Although assumed to have been a spontaneous reaction to Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, statements by people close to Arafat prove the Palestinian violence was premeditated by Arafat following his rejection of the generous peace offerings of Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton at Camp David.

Even Arafat’s widow, Suha, admitted, “I met him in Paris after Camp David. He told me, ‘You should remain in Paris.’ I asked why, and he said, ‘I am going to start an intifada.’”

That intifada sounds eerily similar to what Mahmoud Abbas created in 2015.

Just prior to the Jewish New Year of 2000, the Palestinian Authority Voice of Palestine radio station broadcast calls “to all Palestinians to defend the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

The PA closed schools and bussed students to the Old City to participate in organized riots. Hundreds of Arabs hurled rocks and bricks at Jewish worshipers praying at the Western Wall. The rioting spread to towns and villages throughout the territories and the Gaza Strip.

Arafat continued his incitement to violence. In January 2004, following suicide bombings that killed 40 Israelis and injured hundreds, he called on Palestinians to spill more blood by chanting, “With our souls and our blood, we will redeem you, Palestine. Until Jerusalem! Towards Jerusalem are marching millions of martyrs!”

While calling for “peace of the brave,” Arafat was giving Israelis “peace of the grave.”

Abbas followed in Arafat’s footsteps with his incitement to kills Jews, an incitement couched in Islamic terms. Other members of his administration also used inflammatory language.

Jibril Rajoub infamously said if Palestinians had a nuclear weapon they would nuke Israel.

Dennis Ross, a former Palestinian-Israeli negotiator and two-state solution advocate, criticized his own government for ignoring Palestinian incitement:

Palestinian systematic incitement in their media, an educational system that breeds hatred, and the glorification of violence, made Israelis feel that their real purpose was not peace.

Incitement to genocide is an international crime. When propagated by an authority claiming statehood, it becomes state-sponsored incitement to genocide.

Incitement is encouraging others to commit an offense by communications such as broadcasts, publications, or speeches.

Incitement to genocide means that both the inciter and the listener understand the implications of the call to action. There can be no doubt what the implications of Abbas’ call to spill blood means to knife-wielding Arabs targeting Jews.

The fact that genocide did not result is no defense for the inciter. Public incitement to genocide can be prosecuted even if genocide does not occur. Actual genocide is not necessary for the crime to have been committed, only that it had the potential to spur genocidal violence. It is the intent of the speakers words that create the criminal actions.

Palestinian leaders including Mahmoud Abbas and Ismail Haniya should be brought to trial for incitement to genocide.

As such, they cannot be considered as peace partner, but criminals.

They are the cause for Palestinian unrest, not Israelis building homes on land they consider legally theirs.

Barry Shaw is the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism.’

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